Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes

Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.

A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics

Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.

Why is geometry often described as cold and dry? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree.

Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.

A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales...

If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That's fractals.

A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.

Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.

Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.

The theory of chaos and theory of fractals are separate, but have very strong intersections. That is one part of chaos theory is geometrically expressed by fractal shapes.

The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.

There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable

The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set ... is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as 'chaos'.

An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.

Asking the right questions is as important as answering them

There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

Engineering is too important to wait for science.

Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere

Both chaos theory and fractal have had contacts in the past when they are both impossible to develop and in a certain sense not ready to be developed.

When people ask me what's my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.

Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.

My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable

Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there's always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills

The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.

Order doesn't come by itself.

The straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.

If you look at a shape like a straight line, what's remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.

I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.

The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

In mathematics and science definition are simple, but bare-bones. Until you get to a problem which you understand it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages and years and years of learning.

I had many books and I had dreams of all kinds. Dreams in which were in a certain sense, how to say, easy to make because the near future was always extremely threatening.

For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.

Now that I near 80, I realize with wistful pleasure that on many occasions I was 10, 20, 40, even 50 years ahead of my time.

There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.

I didn't want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure - I wanted to do something different.

I spent my time very nicely in many ways, but not fully satisfactory. Then I became Professor in France, but realized that I was not - for the job that I should spend my life in.

I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist's life in France.

In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.

I didn't feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little bit of everything and explore the world.

Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.

I don't seek power and do not run around